Greek Language and Linguistics

Reading the Future Middle and Passive

Today I finished reading all of the instances in the New Testament of what has traditionally been called the future passive (296 instances) and started reading the 485 instances of the future middle. I hope to have something insightful to say about them when I finish, but it’s a daunting task.

No. I’m constructing a complete catalogue of every instance of the future tense forms traditionally called middle and passive to test for what I’ve already shown to be the case in the aorist: the vast majority of verbs only have one or the other of these sets of forms, not both. Very few verbs have both a middle and a passive form. Clearly, they have both sets of meanings, but they express them with only one of the sets of forms.

I’ll have much more to say about this once I’ve completed the analysis. I’ll post the results in the form of a table showing where each form is found, and I’ll discuss the implications.

I finished cataloguing the 485 instances of forms traditionally called future middle some time ago. Now I’m slowly rereading all of the occurrences of those verbs that have both sets of forms (σ “middles” and [θ]η forms) plus any passages where the forms appear to function in ways other than those predicted by the traditional treatment of Greek voice.

This is taking longer than I had hoped because responsibilities at work have not allowed me the time to devote to it that I would like.

When I first posted this announcement back in January, I never dreamed I would still be working on future middles and passives in April! And I certainly didn’t know I would be doing it from Lima, Perú, but here I am, still reading texts with these verb forms, cataloguing different ways of understanding those texts, and hoping I’ll have something worthwhile to say about it soon.

Greetings from Avenida Benavides in Miraflores, one of the many districts of the massive city of Lima, the world’s second largest city built on a desert (Cairo being the first). Lima is home to the oldest continuously functioning university in the Americas: Universidad San Marcos, founded on May 12, 1551, only 59 years after Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas.

Thanks for your continued interest, Stephen. I have actually made little progress lately. Other responsibilities at work have made it very difficult to put in the kind of time the project deserves. I’ll be able to get back too it in a couple of weeks.